Over the past several years, the number and variety of fraudulent calls has steadily increased. Fraudulent callers impersonate government officials, insurance agents, etc. to attempt to scam people into transferring money to them or to trick people into providing personal/financial information (e.g., IRS Frauds). Scammers often target people of certain age groups that may be inexperienced or unsophisticated with technology and thus easily confused. In many cases a fraudulent callers' requests seem legitimate and their stories credible because they have obtained some basic information about the call recipient that can be recited during the conversation in an official-sounding manner, often deceiving the call recipient to provide additional personal information when queried.
Currently, voice and data communications service providers do not provide a process for reliably establishing the identity of calling parties. Further, existing techniques for authenticating the identity of a caller rely on inadequate and unsecure information extracted from a limited number of data fields in a communications connection.